Monday, March 01, 2010

The dude has a concert with Mos Def and postpones it once. Eye Weekly does a story about how evil DOOM truly is and how he’s notorious for hiring impersonators to perform in his deliberate absence. He admits to doing this in the interview and justifies his actions by stating he is a true artist and he’s the “director” or “puppeteer”of his performances. He really wants to simultaneously escape and also submerge himself in his persona. Because in the end DOOM is a character and almost entirely make-believe. On a grand scale this is a cool idea, but fuck a grand scale. I bought one of those once and I couldn’t fit it in my washroom. RETURNED IT.

So our man shows up 3 hours late to perform, (after the DJ left a half plugged in iPod of Raekwon’s Only Built for Cuban Linx II consisting of eardrum-shattering screeches and gunshots) has an IMPOSTER come up on stage and do his thing. People were furious. I was standing kind of far back and happened to be pretty blem at the time so I couldn’t tell at first that he was a phony, but once the real DOOM came on stage and started killing it and there was absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever that it was him. If this guy was an impersonator then the real DOOM has every right to hire this guy as his stand-in.

Mask all shiny and glorious, in the end the whole hype about fake Metal Face Imposters and the faker on stage was just a hoax, possibly an attempt to weed out the semi-fans from the real ones. The crowd instantly forgave him and got crazy hype as if DOOM was really a superhero instead of a true master of evil. He was going all out. Usually rap shows seem kind of bare live, especially with 40-plus year old performers but DOOM could not be stopped.

That is until the sound cut out and the DJ disappeared from the stage. Then DOOM disappeared and things started getting weird. The hype man had to just stand around by himself until DOOM came back and they started joking around to take the edge off. The crowd was not having it, people were getting pissed and nothing could be done to cool them off. Even when the music came back on, it just didn’t feel the same, the energy was gone.

Another 20 minutes into his set and a bunch of old school tracks later, DOOM is on some coke rap flow and his hype man is not playing ball. Already he had threatened the crowd that he would make us rap the words instead of him and was discouraged by his massive hype man from messing around DOOM just replied “DON’T PUSH ME!!!” When a crazy guy is on stage rapping with a metal mask, sometimes it’s hard to tell when they’re joking and when they’re serious.

Anyways.

DOOM disappears from the stage, comes back for a one-song encore and that’s that.

The whole time there was some dude with a Jason-style hockey mask on just standing around on stage. He wasn’t performing or anything. My hunch is that the promoters hired him to make sure DOOM didn’t pull any extra evil shit or try and vanish into thin air after throwing a smoke bomb or something.

Who knows? More importantly, who cares? The dude is an artist as well as an asshole and I’ll never pay to see him live again. When the new King Geedorah album drops I’ll probably download it for free, but that’s about as far as I, or anyone from Toronto will ever go. There are plenty of other talented rappers out there who will put on a good show without fucking with their audience.